Saturday, October 31, 2009

Clocks are set for a change this weekend, and so is the Internet as you know it.

The nonprofit group that controls domain codes for Internet addresses announced yesterday that as of November 16, it will begin a "Fast Track" process for approving web addresses ending in non-Latin characters for the first time since the Internet was created. Rod Beckstom, President and CEO of the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), hailed this development as "an historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet." We should see URLs with country codes in Cyrillic, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, and other scripts by the middle of next year.

Expansion beyond the Roman letters A-Z for characters after the "dot" is expected to dramatically increase the number of Internet users among people worldwide that never use Roman characters, help local businesses, and make the Internet a more valuable resource for millions, including children. For more about this development, see ICANN's video and press release, and today's New York Times article.

Friday, October 30, 2009

Tomorrow is the world's annual celebration of Black Cats (a.k.a "Halloween" to less informed humans). As a virtual black cat (yes virtual cats get to choose their colors), I celebrate not by eating a lot of sticky sweet stuff, but by crawling the web for interesting black cat references. Did you know that some humans used to believe that black cats were originally people turned into cats? Personally, I think humans are just unfortunate transmogrified cats.

Monday, October 26, 2009

Published by the Hauser Global Law School Program at NYU School of Law, GlobaLex is an electronic publication dedicated to international and foreign research. New and updated research guides published by GlobaLex include:

New research guides:

Law and Legal Research in Zambia by Alfred S. Magagula

Updated research guides:

A Guide to the Republic of Azerbaijan Law Research by RamilIskandarovAvaz

The Croatian Legal System and Legal Research by DunjaKuecking, MilivojeZugi, and MarijaGilbota

Essential Issues of the Peruvian Legal System by Sergio Endress Gomez and Milagros Bustillos Pinto

Doing Legal Research in Romania by Dana Neacsu - updated in 2009 by AnamariaCorbesc

Sunday, October 25, 2009

To follow up from last Sunday's post on using blawgs for research, I've just discovered Split Circuits, a blawg dedicated to tracking . . . yes, circuit splits. This blog is good fodder for academics, paper-writers, and Supreme Court watchers.

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